Smith has found the courses in anatomy and biology also to his taste he will be fairly safe in becoming a doctor; if he has not he might become an engineer, whose problems nowadays are surely as long as any man's. Supposing again that Jones, whose character and energies are to be estimated by this purely hypothetical method, has done the following things. He has read The Life of Sir Walter Scott and has been far more interested in the technicalities of Scott's financial status than in any other phase of that absorbing book; also he has read Browning, but without great admiration till he reached the story of The Ring and the Book; and he has studied general European history with interest, but knew, as soon as he began a course in English constitutional history and dipped into Stubbs's original documents, that he had "got somewhere" at last. Even from such slight evidence Jones would be fairly safe in trying the law or a highly systematized business.

But you must not work it out too narrowly, for one of the virtues of the liberal curriculum is that it rarely binds a man to some preconceived specific notion of his destiny. The initial strictness of its demands is ultimately the very thing that makes possible the flexibility and range of the student's choice. College graduates, more than any other class of men, do what they wish, not because of superior social position but because of their emancipating knowledge of the field of opportunity and of themselves.

That such a type of knowledge results from the liberal curriculum in greater degree than from a curriculum chiefly vocational and technical in character, need not lead us into a futile comparison with the professional schools. They have their own definite and unassailable purposes. They do not require defense or even explanation. What is necessary to keep in mind is the grave re

sponsibility that rests on those who have the arrangement of the liberal curriculum in their hands. In the constant and somewhat radical revision necessary to make it accord with modern life and our era of radical progress, there is no need, because of the existence of technical schools on every hand, of forgetting what the central idea in the liberal curriculum has meant. No new quality and no other meaning can safely take the place of that.

XIV

LOSING ONE'S RELIGION: A STUDENT

EXPERIENCE 1

HENRY THOMAS COLESTOCK

There is one word that some of us, who look back on our college life, wish had been spoken to us in the midst of our college course; for, lacking this word of explanation, we have had to learn ab initio, in the severe school of personal experience, one of the lessons worked out by the race through centuries of conflict. Not infrequently has it happened, in working out this problem for ourselves, that the process, compressing into a few months or years the anxiety, the anguish, of a racial experience, brings to the individual moments and days never to be forgotten. But not all learn the lesson when left to themselves, and this is an irreparable injury to the individual; for failure means indifference or even hostility to the most helpful things in life. I refer to the process of adjustment between religious faith and a growing knowledge.

In the experience of the race this problem of adjustment between religious faith and a growing knowledge is one of the great problems of every period characterized by intellectual progress. Nor is it difficult to understand the reason for this age-long conflict between faith and knowledge. The explanation is a psychological one.

Religious faith being one of the dearest and most sacred

1 Reprinted through the courtesy of Henry Thomas Colestock and of The Outlook.

possessions of mankind, it is natural to transfer to our explanations of faith the sacredness of faith itself. Failing to make this distinction between religious faith, which is a life of fellowship with God, and the explanations of this fellowship, which necessarily must vary according to the temperament and the enlightenment of the individual, the problem of adjustment between religious faith and the growing knowledge of the age has at times absorbed the attention and the strength of nations.

The same problem of adjustment between faith and knowledge confronts the student. He comes to college with certain religious ideas and beliefs, and in the progress of his studies finds an antagonism between his religious beliefs and his growing knowledge. At first he puts aside as false whatever does not accord with his religious opinions. Students have been known to go through college rejecting every position in science or philosophy which did not harmonize with their inherited religious beliefs. This, however, is not true of many students. On the other hand, the reasonableness of the conclusions of science and of philosophy wins the assent of the student even against his will. But it seems impossible for him to accept these conclusions and retain his religious beliefs which he thinks of as his religion. He may fight for a time the rising tide of new ideas, but sooner or later he finds resistance useless. He awakens to the fact that these new ideas, hostile to his religion though they be, as it appears to him, are possessing him.

Now ensues one of the tragic struggles of his life. As the new ideas possess him, they undermine certain religious beliefs which he holds on to with terrible earnestness for a while, only to find at last that these beliefs do not mean to him what they once did. Few individuals who have

passed through the heartrending experience of losing their religion can ever forget that experience. Some, after a very trying and painful struggle, learn that religious faith and religious opinions are two very different things; others never learn this lesson, and, having lost their early religious opinions, think they have lost their religion and easily drift into an indifference toward the duties and claims of the religious life. When approached, such persons will tell you, in moments of confidence, that religious matters do not mean anything to them now-they had to give all that up in college.

It is possible, of course, to lose one's religion in college; to degenerate in character, to become immoral and irreligious; as it is possible to become dissolute anywhere. But I have not at present such a class of individuals in mind; but rather those whose characters have not degenerated, but whose religious opinions no longer mean to them what they once did, and who think consequently that they have lost their religion.

The word which some of us wish had been spoken to us who have passed through one phase or another of this struggle of adjustment between faith and knowledge is this: Religious faith is a life of fellowship with God; religion is the living of one's life in view of this fellowship; religious beliefs are explanations of this life of fellowship with God, and it is reasonable to expect that these explanations will vary according to our intellectual progress, being different with the same individual in different stages of his development; and differing also in the thought of different persons owing to training and temperament.

With this distinction between religious faith and religious beliefs firmly grasped, the student need not feel that he is losing his religion when he is being compelled to give up